Sweden - Second Impressions

It wouldn’t do to leave you with the impression that Sweden is full of angry farmers, because we have found lots of other lovely people here since our disaterous introduction to Sweden.

Malmo
Malmo is situated right across the water from Copenhagen, and we got to know the city pretty well since we arrived there with an extra 2 weeks to spare. Like many Scandinavian cities, Malmo has a lot of cyclists. This means that nearly all of the streets have physically separated cycle lanes (normally as part of the footpath). The hosts of our lovely AirBnB lent us two bicycles to explore the city on, which made quick trips to nearby parks much easier.

Overall, the city had a very spacious and open feel to it, with wide roads and not many tall buildings.

Copenhagen
When our two weeks with Ozi and his wife was up, we got back on track with our plans and checked in to our hotel in the center of Malmo. The main excitement here was that the hotel had a deal with a nearby gym, which I’d certainly been missing! Sore days ahead as we made the most of it!

We’d already explored Malmo but had intentionally not been over to Copenhagen, since we were staying right by the train station now.

Copenhagen seemed like a very “happening” city, and as we walked out of the train station I decided that Danish people must have good taste - there was a “Kiwi Pie” stall outside!

Tivoli gardens was pretty cool - it was all really well decorated and looked pretty. The rides were a bit expensive though - something like $20 each to go on the bumper cars!

Most of the time we just wandered round, enjoying the scenery, and we went up a big tower which had a good view of the city.

Gothenburg
Gothenburg was a bit dreary to be honest, it was quite grey and rainy the whole time we were there. There was a great big park that had a zoo in it that we visited one afternoon, and the Universeum (a big zoo/museum) was very cool.

Stockholm
Stockholm was a beautiful city, built on lots of islands. We had a great stay in a hostel-boat, which was very cool!

On our second day we went out to a big open museum, where they had lots of ancient Swedish buildings imported, and combined with a great zoo. We saw wolves, bears, seals, wolverines and reindeer. There was also an ABBA museum, which was oh so sadly closed.

Our third day was spent on a cruise out into the archipelago proper, and we saw lots of beautiful islands (apparently they are rising by about 3cm each year).

And that was it for Sweden - we enjoyed our time there (except the start, of course) and I really liked the cooler weather. My one grouch was that it seems to rain a lot there, but that’s our fault for visiting in autumn!